Monthly Archives: March 2009

USA Today Personal Technology Columnist Ed Baig published a story of two passengers on US Airways flight 1549 that landed in the Hudson River earlier this year. While one passenger was using Mozy online backup and able to recover his data, another wished he was using Mozy:

"Few people suffer data loss in quite as harrowing a fashion as Bill Wiley. He was a second row passenger on the plane that was famously forced to make an emergency landing on the Hudson River. The passengers all survived the crash, of course. But Wiley still hasn’t recovered the two computers he had on board, containing about 250 gigabytes of data from his employer Computer Associates.

Wiley had been good about backing up files on the two computers by sharing the contents of one hard drive with the other. He also kept data on thumb drives. And he rarely traveled with both machines, but had to in this case because of an assignment. "I had no idea how screwed I was about to be," he recalls.

Fellow passenger Paul Jorgensen was more fortunate, at least when it came to his computer. The night before the flight, Jorgensen backed up "a ton of data" on his IBM ThinkPad via a business account his employer had with the Mozy online backup service. Jorgensen works for Epocrates, a producer of medical software.

"Pretty quickly after I realized I was 100% safe [on the ferry] I realized I was going to be in pretty deep trouble without that laptop," says Jorgensen, who had been seated in the first row of the plane. "My life is in that laptop."

Within a day, Mozy sent him 6 DVDs with recovered data. "The accident was on a Thursday. By Monday I was completely back up and running."

Fortunately, most people won’t ever have the experience of losing a laptop as a result of a crash landing into the Hudson River, however, catastrophic computer failure does occur on a daily basis as a result of hard drive crash, leaving a laptop in the taxi, or something as benign as a spilled cup of coffee. By contrast, Mr. Wiley is out thousands of dollars and countless time, while Mr. Jorgensen (who has been using Mozy) was back up and running within a few days.

We’re grateful that all passengers on Flight 1549 were in the hands of such an experienced and skillful crew and were all and able to return to their loved ones without any loss of life or significant injury.

Update: ComputerWorld Columnist Lucas Mearian also published a story about Mozy customer Paul Jorgensen:

"The only thing else not lost forever was the data stored on the laptop, copies of which were kept on the servers of an online backup company. Epocrates uses Mozy to back up data and, uncharacteristically, Jorgensen had backed up his files the night before the flight. Six DVDs holding the data were sent to Jorgensen on Jan. 19, just four days after the crash. "I was left without an excuse to not work. It was almost too quick," he joked. . . .

Without the backup, he would have not only lost all of his business data, but a lot of personal data and photos that he kept on the lost laptop. It was one less thing to worry about, he noted."

As part of our relentless effort to deliver the best online backup service in the world, we are proud to announce the 1.12 release of the Mozy Windows client. Here’s a couple of highlights from this latest release:

We’ve added a search box to the restore tab within the client that lets you search for specific files within your backup. Previously, you could only browse for files and had to know where on their computer it was located, when it was backed up, or in which backup set it was included. You can now search for files on the restore tab in the client.

We’ve differentiated backup sets (i.e. all music files) and file system folders (i.e. the “my music” folder) under the restore tab. We had received some feedback from our customers that the visual display in the restore tab made it difficult to distinguish between file system folders and backup sets. Now, this new overlay icon on the backup set folder icon helps to differentiate it from the file system folders.

We have added the ability to re-associate a new computer. In the event of disaster or data loss, you can use Mozy to easily restore your backup files to another computer. You can also migrate your backup files from one computer to another, as well as transfer files from an old computer to a new computer. You can find additional information about replacing a computer here.

To see the full release notes and download the new client version, check out our update section . Please note that you don’t have to download and install the new client manually, as your old client will auto-update within a week.

Finally, we are constantly looking for ways to improve Mozy, so if you have any comments or suggestions, please email us at support@mozy.com!

We love hearing back from our customers. Andrew Fung in Orlando recently told us about his Mozy story.

Before signing up for a MozyHome Unlimited account, Andrew backed up over 8,000 photos and hours of video manually on DVDs and external hard drives. It was tedious and time-consuming, but it paid off when his hard drive crashed. He was able to restore almost all of his data from his backups, but the crash made him wonder what would have happened if his on-site backups had been lost along with his hard drive.

After researching online backup solutions, he decided Mozy was a perfect fit for his situation.

“Mozy offers the simplicity, versatility and reliability I want at a cost that is actually less than what I would pay to maintain my own on-site storage,” Andrew said. “The client is easy to use but has enough options to ensure my selected data is secure and the few times I have had to restore a few files the process has been straight forward and quick.”

Signing up with Mozy has saved Andrew money and time while protecting his photos, video and other data.

HP’s Upline backup service recently announced to its users that it will be closing its doors on March 31, 2009. We think backing up your stuff is pretty important, so in order to help those HP Upline customers who will be without a backup solution, we’re offering 20% off new MozyHome Unlimited annual and biennial subscriptions. We want to help you keep your data safe, and we (and EMC) want assure you that we’re going to be here for years to come.

Just type in UPLINE at checkout or click here to get 20% off your new Mozy subscription!